November 17

November 17, 2018 — jeffstrand

An item that’s been on my To-Do list for quite a while is “Archive YahooGroups Newsletter.” Back in July 2000, a couple of months after my first novel Graverobbers Wanted (No Experience Necessary)was published, I started a newsletter that went out 208 times. Because I don’t follow the workings of YahooGroups at all anymore, I figured I wouldn’t know until it was too late if they shut the place down, so at some point I wanted to copy everything into a Word document. “At some point” became today.

It ended up being 100,000 words’ worth of material. My favorite part (based on the skimming I was doing while cutting and pasting) is how it transitions from frequent apologies for sending a newsletter so soon after the last one, to apologies for how long it’s been since the last one. (For the first few years after I started it, it was my primary way of communicating with readers. Once I started a blog, the newsletter became less frequent. When I got into social media, it became WAY less frequent.)

I also liked seeing an early example of sharing negative comments: “These aren’t the kinds of books I would download even if free, and certainly I would not read them.
After all, the mind is much like any programmable device, and the time worn
adage ‘garbage in, garbage out’ fully applies.”